Posted By
Accuracy In Media
On
December 19, 2017 @ 8:00 am
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On Target Blog |
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CNN’s Chris Cillizza wrote an analysis[1] bashing White House press secretary Sarah Sanders and her “hugely offensive allegation” against media outlets such as his employer, CNN.

During a televised White House press conference last week, Sanders criticized mainstream media for making major reporting mistakes that tried to paint her boss, Trump, in a negative light:

“There’s a very big difference between making honest mistakes and purposefully misleading the American people. Something that happens regularly. You can’t say — I’m not done. You can’t say that it’s an honest mistake when you are purposely putting out information that you know to be false or when you’re taking information that hasn’t been validated, that hasn’t been offered any credibility and that has been continually denied by a number of people including people with direct knowledge of an incident. This is something that — I’m speaking about the number of reports that have taken place over the last couple of weeks. I’m simply stating that there should be a certain level of responsibility in that process.”

Cillizza admitted that the mistake of ABC News’ Brian Ross was an example of misreporting the news, but defended the media in that they did not purposefully mislead their audience in reporting news that was proven later to be false. Here’s part of his defense:

Mistakes like the one made by Ross amount to striking out with the bases loaded while trying to get a hit. He was trying to get the story right — and failed. What Sanders is alleging is the latter — that reporters are, as an industry, pushing out things they know to be false because they hate Trump and want him to fail. You can’t make a claim like that with zero supporting evidence.